Security News
Roid apps are snooping on other software on your device - and that could tell shady advertising companies more about you than you'd like. The researchers studied 14,342 free Android apps in the Google Play Store, along with 7,886 open-source Android apps.
Preying on public fears, the ongoing coronavirus outbreak is proving to be a goldmine of opportunity for attackers to stage a variety of malware attacks, phishing campaigns, and create scam sites and malicious tracker apps. Now in a fresh twist, third-party Android app developers too have begun to take advantage of the situation to use coronavirus-related keywords in their app names, descriptions, or in the package names so as to drop malware, perpetrate financial theft and rank higher in Google Play Store searches related to the topic.
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More than 50 Android apps on the Google Play Store-most of which were designed for kids and had racked up almost 1 million downloads between them-have been caught using a new trick to secretly click on ads without the knowledge of smartphone users. While the offending apps have been removed from Google Play, the find by Check Point Research is the latest in an avalanche of ad fraud schemes that have plagued the app storefront in recent years, with malware posing as optimizer and utility apps to perform phony clicks on ads.
Researchers have discovered a new family of auto-clicker malware that commits mobile ad fraud, lurking in 56 apps on the Google Play store. Google's uphill battle against malware on Google Play is well known, and the vendor has made a concerted effort in the last couple of years to get rid of bad or unpatched apps and malware.
A new simple but dangerous strain of Android malware has been found in the wild that steals users' authentication cookies from the web browsing and other apps, including Chrome and Facebook, installed on the compromised devices. "Malware could steal cookie files of any website from other apps in the same way and achieve similar results."
Amid numerous malicious attacks leveraging the current COVID-19 coronavirus crisis, security researchers have discovered an Android surveillance campaign targeting users in Libya. One of the COVID-19-themed attacks appears to be part of a larger mobile surveillance campaign operating out of Libya and targeting Libyan individuals, Lookout reveals.
Do you know what information you share within the Google ecosystem? You can easily control what is visible or hidden, from with your Android device. Find out how.
Google has announced the rollout of two new non-negotiable security features for Android users who have also enrolled in the company's Advanced Protection Program. On Wednesday, Google said that the company is now automatically turning Google Play Protect on for all devices with a Google Account enrolled in Advanced Protection and will require that it remain enabled.
Late last week, researchers at network intelligence company DomainTools warned about an Android malware sample that caught our attention. Like many other cyberthreats doing the rounds these days, the criminals have used the coronavirus pandemic as a lure, offering an intriguing if rather creepy app called COVID 19 TRACKER. The website promoting the app offers to "Track Real-Time Coronavirus Outbreak in your Street, City and State", and says it will "Get Real-Time Statistics about Coronavirus outbreaks around you in over 100 countries."